Ever imagined a future without the inconvenience of having to carry around cash, or credit cards, or any wallet at all? Google has brought that future one step closer with the official launch of its smartphone wallet service.The internet giant's latest mobile product has gone live, with owners of the Nexus S 4G from US carrier Sprint being the first able to pay for purchases with a simple tap of their phones."With Google Wallet, you can tap, pay ...

Adding further credence to notions that Google is the new Microsoft, Google CEO Eric Schmidt will face a US Senate hearing which looks to investigate whether the company is now so large and dominant that it now constitutes a monopoly.The primary issue in this hearing is whether Google gives preference to its own websites or products in search results. Whilst what the outcomes of this particular hearing, titled "The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?", may ...

In the digital age, news is all about getting information quickly and on demand. While getting this kind of information is relatively easy with global or even national news, it isn't always the case locally, especially in the developing world.Umuntu Media, which claims to provide exactly this kind of fast, hyper-local information with its iNamibia and iZambia portals, has raised US$1-million in Series A funding from Netherlands based eVentures Africa Fund (eVA fund).The money will be used to ...

From the 1st of October, South African telecommunication provider Telkom will be increasing its data caps by up to 6GB for certain packages, with prices remaining the same per package. A source close to Memeburn gave us an internal memo which outlines the higher caps for the certain internet packages. The increases are as follows: 3GB becomes 4GB, 6GB becomes 8GB and 10GB becomes 16GB.The internal memo carries on by saying how the website and billing will reflect the older ...

In the world of venture capital (VC), ideas are plentiful but fundable businesses are hard to find. Despite the perception, VCs do not fund ideas alone, no matter how solid passionate entrepreneurs believe they are. To negate risk, VCs evaluate proposals based on several characteristics, often in-line with their specific funding mandate, to bridge the huge divide between a cool idea and a fundable business.Differentiated VC funds are inundated with requests for capital to get start-up businesses to the next critical ...

Chinese online media firm Sina is tightening controls over its Twitter like Weibo service. The increased regulation comes amidst concerns over growing government interference on the web.According to the state run China News Service, Sina's CEO Charles Chao announced that the measures were put in place in a bid to curb the spread of malicious rumours on the Weibo service."There are lots of false information and rumours on Weibo, and this will cause great challenges to the government as ...

USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data), has enormous potential to deliver new products and services to mobile customers in sub-Saharan Africa, but has yet to come into its own as a mature, fully-fledged service.Like SMS, USSD has a low barrier to entry for subscribers and customers. It is intuitive, menu-driven and works across all handsets, yet unlike SMS, USSD services and availability varies greatly across Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and regions in sub-Saharan Africa."Just about every handset made in the ...

Imagine controlling one of the most sophisticated flying machines ever made from the comfort of your smartphone. The Parrot AR.Drone is the revolutionary hand-held quadricopter which flies through touch alone. Portable, easy-to-use and most importantly, endlessly exciting, the Parrot AR.Drone is being offered to one lucky winner thanks to TAKEALOT and Gearburn!Founded in 2002, TAKEALOT is a leading South African online retailer. TAKEALOT offers an extensive range of locally supplied and imported Books, DVDs, Music, Games, Electronics, Beauty products and ...

Spend any time with Samsung's latest plasma beast and you will be convinced of two things. First: plasma is far, far superior to LCD or LED in any way but for sheer nuclear brightness. Second: 3D TV is a crock best consigned to bleeding-edgers and those who've not yet spent any time with it. And maybe a third thing -- when did the bloody TV become the home theatre hub?This is a TV to write home about -- it's a ...

Last week, I wrote an article titled Is it time to rethink SSL?, where I pointed out that SSL's reliance on Certificate Authorities is inherently flawed due to the fact that there is no guarantee that a CA will never be compromised. One of the key problems with the CA model of certificate authentication is that once an application decides to trust a CA, there is no realistic rollback from that decision if the CA eventually proves to be untrustworthy. ...